Women Artists

"Her work usually covers "conflict, humanitarian issues, and stories about women and politics" and is largely based in countries suffering from internal conflict – social, economic, or humanitarian."

"Wherever I go I get interested in native plants and animals"

"In Syria, the war that I witnessed was different: It was one fought among civilians, among neighbors."

"She had spent her life living under the Taliban; she knew what that meant for Afghan women, and she understood that she could tell their stories in photographs."

"Women were banned from continuing their education during Taliban rule. But some, like Farzana, found ways to keep studying. She would carry books under her burqa and attended what she calls an "underground school" with about 300 other students in a residential area of Kabul."

"have covered so many wars in so many countries. In Iraq, you could always have got unlucky and caught up in a suicide bombing. In Lebanon, there had been safe areas and risky ones. In Libya, for the most part, it was clearer who was fighting and who was a non-combatant."

"Most of us disregard the natural world. We're a very self-important part of something much bigger."

"“Between the 1980s and now the image of famine and wars has been ingrained in people’s minds. That’s a narrative that’s going to be hard to shift,”"

"Augie-Kuta is the first female politician to run for the house of representatives primaries under a major party for the Argungu-Augie Federal Constituency in Kebbi State, Nigeria."

"“The four things that come to mind when people think of Africa are population, problems, poverty, and promise unfulfilled – headline media reports on the continent. But that’s not the whole story,”"

"Simon and I had a lot in common and we worked together on various committees such as the movement for Colonial Freedom and anti-apartheid movements. We fell in love and got married in January 1954. I settled down to become a full time housewife and mother. Our two children were born in 1955 and 1957 respectively"

"I became Phillippa Yaa when I found my biological father, who told me that if he had been there when I was born, the first name I'd have been given would be a day name like all Ghanaian babies, and all Thursday girls are Yaa, Yawo, or Yaya. So by changing my name I intended to inscribe a feeling of belonging and also one of pride on my African side."

"After growing up black in white South Africa, internalising so many negative 'truths' of what black people are like, I needed to reclaim my humanity and myself from the toxic dance of objectification."

"At that time there were no art colleges or galleries in Lusaka and nothing really to talk about in art. Fortunately just after we arrived I was introduced to the Lusaka Art Society where I attended a meeting and was made secretary"

"Because I wasn't told that I was adopted until I was twenty, I lacked a vocabulary to describe who I am and where I come from, so performing and writing became ways to make myself up."

"This was detrimental to my art studies and I had to repeat a year before I got my degree"

"I am delighted that the Queen has recognised the services of Mrs Cynthia Zukas in promoting art in Zambia and internationally. Mrs Zukas deserves the award as her hard work in the development of the arts has touched many people and received national and international recognition."

"President Dr. Fred M’membe has eulogised late Cynthia Sara Zukas for her selfless service and love saying she was like a parent to most of the people."

""I started writing poetry when I was a child, my first published poem was when I was 11. I was brought up in a home that loved poetry and literature, especially the English language. But it was only when I was older that I realised that writing is so much more than words playing on a page."

"Writing contains the writer, their concerns, their social context and their history. My own history became a block to my creativity as I started to explore my identity as a black woman adopted by a white family in apartheid South Africa."

"I made up my mind to make a contribution to the development of the then new country when we arrived in Zambia in 1965"

"I felt like the colonised and the coloniser were fighting each other inside my brain. Writing continued to be important to me but I was convinced that it was simply a therapeutic process, of no value to anyone else."

"Going to a mixed race university with a small number of black students was a real eye opener for me! I was rudely awakened to the terrible inequality and brutality of the apartheid and racism in South Africa at that time and was quickly swept into the exciting world of student politics"

"As a mixed-race African and adoptee I feel, paradoxically, oppressed and completely free....My adult life has been largely devoted to healing this rift. The freedom of my paradoxical position, is in fact that I don't have the constraints of a traditional role and I have access to the world."

"A feminist foreign policy must be radical, innovative and intersectional. It moves beyond the notion of “add women and stir” and seeks to be transformative. It challenges power by paying attention to and challenging the systems and institutions, such as governments and corporations, that benefit from the oppression of women. A feminist foreign policy is one that moves beyond limiting language, and centers women and all marginalized voices, including trans and intersex folks"

"We must move in these spaces to encourage increased support to young women and girls not simply because it is ‘smart economics’ but because gender equality is a right"

"I truly believe that art (and I use this term loosely here to refer to all forms of creative expression) provides an incredible opportunity for people to bring their full selves to their activism. We are not one-dimensional beings and thus we are affected and influenced by all of the things around us. I see art as an opportunity to take some of the very complex concepts and issues that we face on a daily basis and break them down in ways that are more palatable and easily digestible by young people."

"Amina Doherty, Changing Lives,https://wadadlipen.wordpress.com/2012/04/10/amina-doherty-changing-lives/"

"We decided that in order to shift the power and to put resources in the hands of young feminists, we would need to turn the traditional funding model on its head. This meant that we would need to make space for feminist perspectives, methodologies, ideas and demands—as well as for our physical selves—in the philanthropic world."

"Solidarity as a strategy of resistance reminds us that we are the sum of many parts and, as bell hooks reminds us, “Solidarity is different than support.” Solidarity is about showing up and sticking with things for the long-run. It is about being committed and making bonds with each other in real and deeply personal ways. It is about standing at the intersections and bringing everyone along."

"Victor made another series of large smoke drawings of farm animals on glass called "Brief Lives", which were displayed in an abandoned abattoir. The glass drawings deal with the loss of body and identity and the nature of the smoke speaks of the transience of life."

"Due to her artistically unconventional approach, she is often compared to an alchemist. In the creation and production of its works of art, Unite benefits significantly from her strong physical, chemical, geological and historical knowledge."

"Victor's smoke portraits explore subjects often overlooked, for example South African prisoners awaiting trial and missing children. These portraits capture individuals caught in a vulnerable moment, an idea reinforced through the impermanent nature of the medium used."

"The images I am working with are taken from our daily media coverage of recent and almost commonplace happenings in newspapers, on TV and on radio of social and criminal acts of violence and ongoing unnecessary deaths – occurrences so frequent that they no longer raise an outcry from our public, yet they still constitute disaster in peacetime."

"The portraits are made with the deposits of carbon from candle smoke on white paper. They are exceedingly fragile and can be easily damaged, disintegrating with physical contact as the carbon soot is dislodged from the paper. She was interested in the extremely fragile nature of these human lives and of all human life, attempting to translate this fragility into portraits made from a medium as impermanent as smoke itself."

"Unite is one of the world's most respected artists when it comes to mining. Due to her artistically unconventional approach, she is often compared to an alchemist. In the creation and production of its works of art, Unite benefits significantly from its strong physical, chemical, geological and historical knowledge."

"The fragile and ephemeral process of candle smoke Victor felt was an appropriate medium for the portraits of the primates rendered fragile and impermanent by mankind."

"The technique of using ash as a drawing medium developed from printmaking. Texture and tone in etching is produced when rosin dust is sprinkled onto an etching plate to create an aquatint."

"Strelitzias and bones are ubiquitously the stuff of still life at high schools and tertiary institutions. Themes of flight, transcendence and masks as well as painting's relationship to music have also been well explored in these contexts. All of the above feature prominently in Jeanette Unite's show entitled 'Sentences', and it is for this reason that I found myself suffering from a sense of deja-vu. Somehow though, I felt reluctant to dislike the exhibition. Perhaps it is the energy which clearly suffuses the show or perhaps the sincerity of Unite's quotes which appear throughout the well-produced catalogue. She may, I guess, believe herself but I'm a little less sure."

"I'm not sure I really bought it, but the clearness of the artist's intention and her apparent sincerity cannot be ignored. In the catalogue and abridged essay which appears with the list of works, I found Unite's claims grandiose and her jumps from one subject to another a little unbelievable and unresolved. I also battle to discern the relationship between pretty abstract paintings and a peppering of very specific themes. Nevertheless, as a visually consistent body of work and a thorough exploration of various media I find it interesting."

"Jeannette Unite also works directly with the products of mining. She, however, signals the artist’s complicity in the industry. Creating her own pastels using pigments ground from leftover minerals and mine tailings she continues the tradition of landscape representation, but knowingly constructs her images from the constituents of land itself."

"Irma Stern travelled frequently between South Africa and Germany as a child and this pattern continued into her adult life. During the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, she exhibited throughout Europe and was both known and respected there than in South Africa, where the reception of her work was overwhelmingly negative."

"Searching, I roamed the world—to arrive at the origin—at beauty—at truth—away from the lies of everyday—and my longing was burning hot—then the darkness opened up and I stood at the source of the Beginning—Paradise."

"Verification of the art must still be done, but from a layman's view it appears to be the same pieces that were taken in Pretoria."

"Mining has been central to her practice since an introduction to alluvial diamond prospecting pits on the Palaeolithic African West Coast beach resulted in her first body of work Earthscars (2004). The exhibition engaged the damage done directly to the earth by excavation, and aligned her concerns with an eco‐ feminist consciousness of earth as body."

"Her heavily-laden brush deposits swathes of colour and a tracery of mark that evokes at times the sweep and syncopation of Islamic calligraphy. The calligraphy that she encountered in the carved cartouches of the lintels of Zanzibari doors and the Islamic manuscripts which she collected, armed and liberated her mark-making. The boldness of her impasto brushwork results in a tangible embodiment of her sitters and their contexts, such that her decision to frame the works using fragments of Zanzibari doors feels completely in keeping."

"Shopping and clothing is part of my family’s culture. If something is wrong, you go buy a dress."

"If I had something I always wanted something else, I’m just that sort of person."

"She works in a wide variety of media in her artwork, producing sculptures, objects, prints, film, and more, which she often bases on personal experiences and self exploration."

"Her candidness regarding personal flaws and the cycles of repression and coping that accompany conservative, middle class, Afrikaans upbringing inform much of her work, calling attention to ways in which women are silenced or otherwise repressed in that space."